My sh2perl came from a codification of a joke that I had used in my llama class from about 1994 onward.

The joke originated because I had "Sadly, there is no sh2perl" on my page that talked about "a2p" and "s2p", but I wanted to say more about that. So I added that there was a FAQ entry about that (in the very old FAQ) saying that "tchrist@perl.com" had been set up as a mail server to translate shell to Perl, and then explained why that was a joke. But I kept embellishing (as I do with the oldest jokes in the courseware) to say that all you really need to do is change: